Category: Writing

I got my laptop back from the Genius Bar 10 days ago, and the graphics card has just started to go again, so I probably only have another week or two before the whole computer dies a third time. In the meantime: the post-Nanowrimo entry that I promised!

Writing groups are invaluable for authors. The one I’m currently in is run by my friend Rob, who I met through Nanowrimo lo these many years ago. If you’re looking for a writing group in your area, check out Meetup.com, or get in touch with the people in your regional Nanowrimo forums. If there aren’t any around, there are some online writing groups that might benefit you. You could also start your own, but I’d recommend seeing how other people run this kind of group before you take on the responsibility yourself.

How To Critique

1. It’s not all about you

A lot of groups require you to attend and critique other people’s work a few times before you can submit your own. The group isn’t there for you to dump your most recent work on and then jet off when you’re done. We’ve had a few people do this in our group—a brand new member signs up for their first month in the group, gives us a short story to have critiqued, and then never shows up again after that. Worse is when they do that but don’t actually show up for the critique itself. Writing groups are give-and-take, and that means you have to put in the time before you get the benefit. And why wouldn’t you? If you cultivate your relationship with the group, you can continue to use this resource for years afterward.

2. Their work is not your work

One of the first mistakes a lot of critiquers make is trying to mold other people’s work to fit their own style. You don’t say “It would be better if you…” when you’re critiquing. What you say is “This part didn’t work for me.” You’re there to tell the author what parts felt off to you. You’re not there to fix it. That’s their job.

3. Prioritize

Sometimes you’ll get a work that’s perfect in every way, and you struggle to find something to say. Other times you’ll get something that looks like someone mashed their face into a keyboard for ten minutes. In the first case, you congratulate the author and ask them what specifically they’re looking for, since the odds are they have an idea of what they think needs work (unless they’re just there for the accolades, which is something I’ll address in a moment). In the second case, you need to think about what advice will help the author the most. You can’t point out every mistake, because the author might get demoralized and give up on this story (or writing in general) forever, and in any case it’s a waste of your time. Instead, look at the big picture. What is the biggest problem with the story? Which thing, when fixed, will make the biggest difference? Focus on just one of them.

4. Forget grammar and spelling

No, seriously. Forget them. That kind of stuff is cosmetic, and it’s a waste of everyone’s time to focus on that when the whole story or chapter might be rewritten. There have been people in my writing group who refused to critique someone’s story because of the typos or punctuation problems they had, which is a ridiculously condescending thing to do. It’s not helping anyone. It’s just embarrassing the author. Remember when I talked about priorities? Grammar and spelling are two of the lowest priorities, and should be focused on only when the bigger issues have been fixed. You, as a member of the writing group, are not the end audience for this work. You’re seeing this story in all its rough, half-constructed squalor. Don’t waste your time critiquing the paint job unless the author asks for it.

5. Don’t forget the good parts

Yes, you’re there to point out the mistakes, but it really helps to point out what worked, too. Every single time you critique, try to find one thing you liked, even if you absolutely hated the story. They probably didn’t get everything wrong, after all, and a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as they say. They’ll be more likely to listen to your critique if they know all is not lost. Additionally, letting them know what worked means that they won’t cut that part out in their edits.

How to be critiqued

1. It’s not all about you, part 2

It’s nice to get compliments on your work, but your writing group is not the place to get them. If you have a story that’s perfect in every way, maybe consider submitting something else instead. And if you do submit something that you think is perfect, don’t be surprised if and when it gets criticism. That’s the point of a writing group.

2. Stay inside the glass box

Some writing groups have this as a rule. Mine doesn’t, but sometimes I wish it did. When you’re getting critiqued, you cannot argue with your critiquer. Ideally, you shouldn’t talk at all. If your critiquer has completely misunderstood the point of the story and is going off in the completely wrong direction, it’s not your place to tell them. Once your work is out there in the wild, it has to stand on its own. You won’t be there to correct every reader of their misconceptions. So when your critiquers get something wrong, take that as a sign that you need to fix the story, not set your critiquer straight.

3. Give yourself a few days to soothe your ego

Critiques can be demoralizing. Remember: they’re not critiquing you. They’re critiquing your story so you can make it better. The ego punch gets easier each time you get critiqued, but it still can bug you even if you’re a seasoned veteran. Your first reaction might be to reject all the critique and give up on editing entirely. Don’t let that happen! Instead, wait a few days or a week, then revisit the criticism with an open mind. (I hope you took notes!)

4. Consider saying yes

There have been a few times in my writing group when my critiquers have suggested a change to the story that was completely out there. Get rid of your main character. Write the story from someone else’s point of view. Rework your magic system. My first reaction was to dismiss that out of hand. That big of a change is ridiculous, right? It would require rewriting everything. But then I actually sat down with my notes and said to myself “What if I did make this change? What then?” What had seemed ridiculous quickly became exciting, and the changes I made to my novel (rewriting it from the point of view of an entirely different character) vastly improved it. If you get advice like this, especially if it’s from a majority of your writing group, it doesn’t hurt to consider the possibility. Squash your initial urge to say no and seriously consider what the changes might do.

5. Know when to say no

On the other hand, there can be times when your writing group is urging you to write an entirely different story from the one you wrote, and you have to put your foot down. Remember that this is only a small subset of people, and they don’t always know what’s best for your story. If only one or two are advocating for a big change, or if the people who don’t like what you’ve done are people with little to no experience in your genre, it might be a good idea to put their advice aside. After all, your writing group is there to critique, and there is always going to be more to critique, ad infinitum. At a certain point, you have to know when to stop editing and release your story out there into the wild.

Also my laptop died a terrible death, so I’m on an ancient one with a dead battery that I’m constantly unplugging by accident. Tomorrow I take a trip to the Genius Bar and see what the verdict is. Happy December!

We’re coming up to the wire now: Nanowrimo starts in less than 3 hours for me (on Eastern Daylight Time) and has already started in most of the world. So here’s my final post in the Nanowrimo prep series. I hope to do a couple posts during the month of November if I can tear myself away from my own book, and I definitely have some plans for a “What Next?” series after Nanowrimo ends. So without further ado:

Point of View

This might seem like something very minor, and when compared to plot and setting and character, it is. Still, your decision to write in first, second or third person can make a big difference in how your reader receives the story.

Arthur Golden, who wrote Memoirs of a Geisha, said in a later interview that his first few drafts were written in third person, and while people were interested in the concept, no one wanted to touch the novel.

Before meeting Mineko, I’d written a draft in third person. Even after interviewing her I felt no temptation to try entering the head of my protagonist by writing in first person. Instead I wrote another 750 page draft in third person. While I was revising it for submission, a number of big name agents and editors in New York began calling me–very heady stuff for an unpublished writer. But when they saw the manuscript, they all lost interest. I know I’m a perfectly competent prose stylist; I didn’t think the writing itself had scared them away. And the subject matter is so fascinating–or at least it was fascinating to me. The way I saw it, if I’d failed to bring the world of geisha compellingly to life, I’d done something dreadfully wrong. And in fact, as I came to understand, my mistake was having chosen to use a remote, uninvolved narrator.

Writing the novel in first person made the story closer and more personal, which was exactly what the novel needed.

First person (“I walked down the street”) is particularly useful in genres where the action or emotion of the plot needs to come through. It seems to me that a large part of the success of Fifty Shades of Grey has been because it was written in first person, which lets the reader imagine that they’re the main character. It’s also popular in urban fantasy, which is often full of romance and action. Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy did fantastic things with first person point of view, breaking a lot of rules. If you want to learn how to do first person well, read that series.

Second person (“You walked down the street”) is extremely rare. A lot of people have an irrational dislike of it. I happen to like it, but that’s just me. Unless you’ve been in Homestuck fandom, you probably haven’t seen too much of it, at least not in fiction. I wrote a short story in second person and my writing group unanimously hated the POV. One of them complained that she wasn’t doing the things described in the story, so why was the text telling her she was? It was a bizarre complaint, but not uncommon. Writing in second person can make your novel stand out, but it runs the risk of putting off readers. Any time a writing technique is too obvious, it distracts from the story itself. If you have a good excuse for it, though, do it! Just beware of the potential response you’ll get. (Side note: this is why I recommend that beginning writers write fanfiction. You can experiment with lots of writing techniques like this one with very little consequence).

Third person (“She walked down the street”) is most common, and therefore most invisible. It might be more narratively distant than first and second person, but it’s useful if you have multiple points of view in your story, or if you want to leave a little bit of mystery in your main character’s head. It’s a pretty safe bet, for better or worse. Don’t rely on it too much, though, because you could be missing out on a better option.

Basic? Yep. And you might not even know which POV your story should be in until after you’ve written it. If you get a chance during the frenzy of Nanowrimo, try writing the opening scene in all three POVs and see which one sounds best. It might make a big change in your novel.

That’s it for my Nanowrimo prep posts. I hope they were helpful. For those attempting it this month, good luck!

I remember in high school, reading books like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck’s The Red Pony and having to identify the Christ metaphors and color symbolism. I knew without a doubt that no author would ever actually put this crappy symbolism stuff in their novel intentionally. Unless you were doing it with the sole purpose of giving high schoolers work to do, what was the point of it all?

The idea of annoying high schoolers is a good motivating factor, but now that I’ve had a little more experience with novel writing, I’m beginning to realize that you can’t really write a story without a theme. A story without a theme has all the soul of a grocery list. It’s just a sequence of events with no real meaning behind it.

First, let’s define theme. A theme is what your story is about, even though it’s never stated outright. It’s the invisible thread that links your subplots to the main plot, and it’s the kind of thing that makes readers think about your book after they’re done reading.

For example, in Love, Actually, there are a number of story lines going on at the same time, but they’re all exploring different facets of love, illicit or familial or unconventional or passionate. In Batman Begins, the theme is fear, and how you let your fears define you–whether you use it to become a hero, or use it to control and incapacitate a city. In Finding Nemo, the theme is how avoiding all risk keeps you from experiencing life.

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station always comes to mind when I think of themes. The book explores intersections and borders—that in-between space that happens when something meets up with something else. One character in the story is made up of pieces of many different creatures. He hires a sculpture to sculpt his portrait, and her challenge is finding how to represent those places where he turns from one creature into another. Yet she herself is a creature that has the body of a human female and the head of an ant. Another character is a bird-man, but his wings have been cut off, so he’s not quite bird enough and not quite man enough for the societies around him. The subway station after which the book is named is integrated so completely into the cramped neighborhood around it that no one can really tell where the neighborhood ends and the station begins. The more you look at the story, the more connections you can see to this specific theme.

I previously talked about making characters, and how they need to have goals throughout the story. The three questions that I recommended you ask for each scene were:

What does your character want?What does she do to get it?What do her actions achieve?

When you’re developing a theme, you can go back to those questions and add another question on the end:

Why?

Why do these particular consequences happen, and not others? If your character achieves what she set out to get, why? If she doesn’t, why not? What message are you trying to send with the outcome of your story?

I’m not saying that you have to have a moral to your story, but you should have a question that your story answers, or a statement that your story affirms. If your theme is “do the means justify the ends”, then at the end of the story, your plot should have answered this question in some way. If your theme is “love conquers all”, then when the curtain falls, love will have done so.

A lot of times, if you have an idea for a story, you already probably have an idea for a theme, even if you don’t know it yet. It’s especially thrilling when you examine your story in progress and realize that your various subplots already fit into a theme. As an exercise, look over something you’ve already written, or something you have in progress, and try to find a unifying thread that runs through the story. You might be surprised.

As an added bonus, just think of the irritated high schoolers who might be searching your book for these very themes in the future.

A lot of story planning can start with setting. Depending on the genre, you could come up with a whole series worth of plots, just from making a map and figuring out what kind of people live in the world you’ve created. The setting can (and should!) be a character in itself. It can help or hinder the events of the story and provide major plot points. There should be a good reason that the story is set where it is. The tv show Dexter wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t set in Miami. Buffy the Vampire Slayer wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t in California. Imagine Portal without Aperture Science. Imagine Batman without Gotham City.

Holly Lisle has a lot of good writing advice on her website, and one of the posts that I’ve found useful is her article on developing the fictional world through mapping. In it, she talks about how to make a map and how to use that to figure out a story. This is great for fantasy or science fiction stories that are set in places other than Earth, but even more local stories could benefit from mapping out a city or town.

Obviously only a tiny fraction of your research is going to make it into your story, because you don’t want to deluge your reader with information. One of the fastest ways to get someone to put down your book is to hammer them with paragraph upon paragraph of detailed description about your country’s history and system of currency and notable citizens. Those are things you can sprinkle in the story when (and if!) they become relevant. It’s okay if you come up with an elaborate system of laws and then it never comes up in the novel. Don’t try to force it in just so you don’t feel like you wasted your time.

On the other hand, you don’t want to suffer white room syndrome. That’s when your characters talk to each other and occasionally do things, all while moving around in featureless white rooms. Your reader is going to need something to anchor the scene. Visual descriptions are good, but using the other senses can be better. What does the place smell like? Sound like? What’s the temperature? The great thing is that this leads right back to character. What does your character think of the smell/sound/temperature? Are they the kind of person who bundles up in the slightest breeze? Does the smell remind them of their grandmother’s cooking? Is it always too loud for your character?

Your characters are going to be physically interacting with this setting, and it’s going to effect them directly in ways they might not even be aware of. They could have adopted the social mores and local dialect without realizing it. Alternately, they could be an outsider to the setting and come up against hostility or uncomfortable misunderstandings at every turn.

One thing I like to do in novels is consider the season and the weather. It’s a cliche to start your novel with a description of the weather, but occasionally referencing what’s going on outside can help set the scene and anchor the story in time. Is there a heat wave? Is there a blizzard forecast for later in the week? Have there been weeks of endless rain? Is it perfect spring weather outside? Mira Grant’s book Deadline, book two in the Newsflesh trilogy, has a major plot point centered around a hurricane that was honestly chilling when it was introduced.

There’s a lot more you can explore when building your setting, including time period, technology, religion, fashion, music, economy, politics, and so on. Just remember two things: try to give just enough detail to be interesting, and make sure not to get so involved in worldbuilding that you never get around to writing the story.

We found out this really simple rule… We can take these beats, which are basically the beats of your outline, and if the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats, you’re fucked, basically. You’ve got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you’ve written down is either the word ‘therefore’ or ‘but.’ Right? So what I’m saying is you come up with an idea and it’s like okay ‘this happens, right? … and then, this happens.’ No, no, no! It should be ‘this happens… and therefore, this happens.’ [or] ‘this happens… but this happens.’—Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park.

You don’t have a story without character. This sounds obvious, and you might think that what I mean is that a story doesn’t exist without people for the plot to happen to, but that’s backwards. Plot doesn’t happen to characters. Characters create plot.

Certainly it’s possible to write a story where the plot happens independent of the actions of the characters, but that story is going to have a fatal flaw: the characters won’t develop and grow and achieve their character arc, since nothing they do has any effect on what happens to them. Unless the characters can make choices, suffer the consequences, and learn from their mistakes, they’re never going to change. And that, of course, is the point of the story: your protagonist is a different person at the end of the story than she was when the story began.

In other words, if you presented your protagonist with the same choice at the start and end of your novel, she should make a different choice the second time due to the stuff she’s learned over the course of the novel.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s the character arc, and first you need to come up with your character’s starting position. What does your character want? What is her driving motivation? As the curtain rises, what is your protagonist’s number one desire, and what is she doing to achieve that? Why are we even reading about this character in particular and not about someone else?

And while you’re considering that, what is your antagonist’s desire? The key factor that makes your antagonist an antagonist is that he is going to get in the way of your protagonist achieving her goals.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

— Kurt Vonnegut

1. Your protagonist has a desire, and a specific idea of how to achieve that desire (not necessarily what they’re going to do during the story, but what they THINK they’re going to do during the story).

2. Your antagonist has a desire, and a specific idea of how to achieve that desire, and their actions to achieving their desire are going to block your protagonist from their own goals.

It’s this conflict that’s going to kickstart the plot of your novel. Each subsequent scene is going to lead from the choices your characters make. If your plot requires characters to do things they’d never normally do, the story is going to feel forced and artificial for the reader. Everyone’s seen movies or read books where the characters act exceptionally dumb just so the next plot event can happen. It’s frustrating, and kicks the reader out of the story. Don’t do that. Instead, remember these three questions:

What does your character WANT?
What does she DO to meet those goals?
What do her actions ACHIEVE?

Every scene in your novel is going to answer these three questions, though the answers will change from scene to scene. What’s important is that they have answers, so the scene keeps moving forward. If she doesn’t want anything, then she won’t be taking any actions. If she wants something but doesn’t do anything to get it, that scene has no purpose and shouldn’t be in the story. If she wants something and does something to attain it, there will always be some sort of consequence to her actions, positive or negative.

Before this gets too long, here’s a list of questions you should ask for each main character in your story. I’ve cobbled this together from Chuck Wendig’s post on making characters. Forget the questionnaires that ask your character’s favorite color and most hated band. These are the questions you need to answer before you start your story:

What does the character want?
What does she do to get it?
What consequences happen as a result?
What does the character fear most?
What does she think the solution to her problem will be?
What is her greatest character flaw?
What is her personality, in one sentence?
What is her internal conflict?
What is her external conflict?
How is she connected to the other characters?
What is she good at?
What is she bad at?
How does she change over the course of the story?

If you can answer these questions, you’ll start to have an idea of how the characters are going to interact and what conflicts are going to come up between them. Your plot will develop from there.

Nanowrimo is a month and a half away, and while technically the rules state that you can only start planning a week in advance, I say fuck the rules. If you want to end November with a novel you can actually do something with, you need a plan.

Nanowrimo calls them planners and pantsers (as in, flying by the seat of your pants), although I’ve heard the latter called “organic” writers too. The idea is that there are two kinds of writers: those who outline, and those who make it up as they go along. There are benefits to both sides. In 2004 I started the month with absolutely no idea of what I was going to write about, and every word I wrote was a surprise to me. Where does the first scene start? Well, let’s pick a random room and say it’s in a bathroom. A bathroom where? In a church. What’s the character doing there? He’s at a funeral. Why isn’t he at the funeral itself? Because he doesn’t want to see his late best friend’s family. And so on. I love discovering the story at the same time the characters do. You don’t know what’s behind a door until you open it and find out what your brain has come up with.

Of course, pantsing means you end up with a massive, meandering novel that takes a lot of false turns before it finds its way, and that means there’s a lot of editing in your future. If you’d rather end up with something more coherent, you should have an outline. This can be anything from a vague series of scenes you know you need, to a specific scene-by-scene analysis. In 2009, I decided to outline my novel to within an inch of its life before I started. Oddly enough, this didn’t work very well. When I actually sat down to write, all the joy had been sucked out of the process. The characters felt wooden. The dialogue seemed unnatural to me because it couldn’t flow naturally when it had to follow a strict route. My novel ended up much, much shorter than it was supposed to, because I’d followed each point in the outline without any improvisation or tangents.

Over the next few years, I figured out how to have a plan that didn’t wring the fun out of writing. Here are a few suggestions for routes you can take. You’ll probably have to try a couple before you see what works for you.

The tentpole method:

You know a few key scenes in advance, and all you have to do is figure out how the characters get from one to the next. At the very least, the scenes you need to know should be the inciting incident (the event that sets the novel in motion) the turning point (what makes the protagonists start acting against the antagonist instead of just reacting) and the resolution (the final showdown or the event that resolves the plot). As you write, you’ll probably figure out more scenes that you need in order to get from A to B to C. I like to keep a running list of what I know I need to include, deleting the ones I’ve done and adding the new ones I’ve realized I now need.

This one’s a pretty famous method of outlining. Basically, the idea is that you come up with a short, one sentence summary of your story; then expand that to a paragraph; then expand each sentence of the paragraph to a paragraph of its own; and so on. Follow the link above to read the detailed explanation. If you’re someone who likes really specific outlines, this might work for you.

This entire story has been such a mess that it’s really hard to know where to begin. It would be nothing more notable than two massive corporations vying for supremacy if there wasn’t this bizarre rhetoric about holy wars and oppression surrounding it. Hachette versus Amazon has come to symbolize the larger war of self-published authors (or indie-pub or author-pub or whatever terminology you want to use) against traditionally published authors, and the old guard versus the new upstarts.

Let’s see if I can recreate the timeline of events:

July 2012: Apple is found guilty of colluding with big publishers, including Hachette, to set ebook prices higher than Amazon’s usual $9.99 price tag. As part of their punishment, the publishers involved are forced to renegotiate their contracts with their retailers, including Amazon, and are no longer allowed to set their own prices for two years. In other words, Amazon can discount their ebooks to their heart’s content and the publishers can’t do much about it. A fitting punishment, really, since the publishers did commit a crime.

Early May, 2014: The contracts from the anti-trust agreement are due to expire. Hachette is the first publisher to start negotiating with Amazon again. Amazon, which controls 50% of the book selling market, wants to continue to sell Hachette’s ebooks at a discount. Hachette refuses. In retaliation, Amazon starts pretending all books published by Hachette are out of stock and will take 2-4 weeks to ship. It also recommends other, lower-priced books to customers on Amazon, and stops letting readers preorder Hachette books. Many Hachette authors see their sales plummet. Here’s Stephen Colbert on the dispute. (Side note: I don’t watch television, so it’s only in watching that video that I realized Hachette isn’t pronounced ‘hatchet’).

Late May: Amazon finally issues a statement, and offers to establish an “author pool” to give Hachette authors some of the money they’ve been losing, as long as Hachette agrees to cover the other half of the cost. In other words, Amazon punched a bunch of authors in the face, then said they’d only give them some ice if Hachette helped pay for it. Hachette looks bad if they don’t help their authors, but it’s admittedly Amazon who punched the authors in the face in the first place.

Hachette responds, saying that they’ll agree to compensate the authors hurt in the deal once Amazon and Hachette have come to an agreement about the pricing. Still, Amazon doesn’t mind a little bit of a tarnished reputation as long as this strategy works. If Hachette gives in, then each subsequent publisher whose contract comes up for negotiation is more likely to give in, since they’ll have seen what damage Amazon can do. The more publishers let Amazon control the prices, the more Amazon will control the entire market, and eventually publishers themselves will start going bankrupt, which—since Amazon is, of course, a publisher as well—means Amazon will benefit financially.

Late July:Amazon writes another letter. This one points out that customers buy more books when books are cheaper. In other words, everyone makes more money when prices get lower. They also say that authors should get 35% royalties on their books, and say they think Hachette isn’t paying its authors enough. (Amazon also casually slips in a mention of Hachette’s illegal collusion.)

Today: Amazon sends a letter to their Kindle Direct Published authors, asking them to join the battle. They ask their authors to email Hachette’s CEO, and to cc Amazon on the email. They mention many of the events listed above. It’s weird in many ways, but to me, this is the weirdest: the readersunited.com domain on which they published that letter was registered 18 months ago. Yes, that’s right, a good 14 months before this brouhaha even started. (Though I’m not sure when, exactly, Hachette and Amazon began negotiating in private). So, uh, I’m not sure what to make of that.

Phew, that took far too many open tabs to compile. Long story short, this struggle between Amazon and Hachette is a key battle for power in the publishing world. If Hachette wins, Amazon loses a bit of its power for a little while longer. If Amazon wins, it’s possible that it will kick off a slow decline into bankruptcy for not just Hachette but all the big publishers.

As for my opinion on the matter? I don’t want Amazon to be a monopoly. They might have low prices now, but that won’t necessarily be the case once they’re free from competition. Also, I don’t think it’s too much to ask readers to pay more for their book than they’d pay for a Starbucks latte, since the former took a little more effort to make.

I’d had every intention of starting Camp Nanowrimo by now, but events have conspired to keep me from even starting to think about my next project. Last Wednesday, my mother broke—nay, shattered—her ankle while walking on the beach. She is currently recovering from her first surgery and waiting for the second. The first surgery screwed a metal cage onto her leg and foot to hold everything in place. The second will bolt metal plates to her bone, making her a cyborg. This means that I’ve spent most of the last week driving back and forth between Providence and Boston, leading me to wonder why anyone would ever willingly commute to Boston.

Originally I was going to start off Camp Nanowrimo with a bang, making a second attempt at Nanowriday, which I tried and failed at last year. I just want to beat my wordcount from last time. But in order to do that, I have to have a vague idea about what to write. This is always the most fun part of writing—the part when the possibilities are endless. I move back in with my parents on Friday, and hopefully I can steal away from my nursing duties for 24 hours to make a valiant effort at writing 50k words. Or, at the very least, more than 10k.

In other news, I took advantage of the Steam summer sales and picked up a few games for my future procrastination. Tomb Raider, Borderlands 2, The Stanley Parable, The Wolf Among Us, and Civ V: Brave New World. That should help with that whole Camp Nanowrimo thing.

Oh! And before I forget: my fiendish critiquer William has started an epistolary book rec blog at Hey Ashers! If you like YA novels, especially spec fic with queer themes, you might be interested in what Will has to recommend.

So now I’ll get back to melting in the heat and thinking about my next project. I hope it’s not supposed to be this hot the rest of the week, especially on Friday, which is my moving out day. Let’s see what Weather.gov has to say about the forecast.

I went to my hometown’s Memorial Day parade on Monday, the first time I’ve been to a parade in a few years. I somehow managed to fill my overburdened phone with photos instantly, but I did get a few good shots before it gave up, like the above picture. The parade wasn’t so much a visual spectacle as an auditory one, with musketmen stopping every once in a while to let off shots, and rows of police cars and fire engines all sounding their sirens at once. There’s something a lot more emotional about hearing a parade than seeing it.

The last time I met up with my writing group for one of our Sunday writing sessions, we discussed how to get emotion across in a scene without actually telling the reader what someone is feeling. How can you show that, say, Mary and Yvonne are in love without just saying “Mary was in love with Yvonne”? A lot of stories use sexual attraction as shorthand for love, especially movies where there isn’t much time to explore the intricacies of actual emotions. Mary sees Yvonne in that hot dress, they get it on, and later when Yvonne is murdered by the villain, Mary goes on a mission of revenge. But there’s something inherently unsatisfying about that setup. Sex isn’t love, and it’s unlikely that Mary would clamp a knife between her teeth and belly-crawl into the villain’s lair for just anyone she’s slept with. So what was special about Yvonne?

I could say “the loud noise of the police sirens at the parade made me emotional”, but it’s better if I say “the sirens were so loud that they felt like a physical presence around me, cutting me off from the crowd and forcing my heart to beat faster.” Ok, that’s a little purple. Let’s try again. I could say “Mary loved Yvonne”, but it’s better if I say “When Mary saw a funny news article, her first thought was to text Yvonne the link and imagine Yvonne’s smile when she read it.”

I know that this is just a restating of “show, don’t tell”, but my point is not to say that it should be done, but rather try to figure out how. I don’t have an answer for this. The answer is probably different for each reader.

To a certain extent, I think the emotion needs to be exaggerated a little. When I was young, I was a dancer, and whenever we had to go on stage, we had to pile on lots of makeup so that the people thirty or forty feet away in the audience would be able to see it. In writing, the reader is far outside the writer’s head and might need a little extra makeup slathered on to get to picture. That analogy is clumsy, because too much exaggeration makes the story look like a pantomime, but too little can lead to dry, emotionless characters. If it hasn’t been established that Mary really loved Yvonne, then when Mary straps on her thigh holster and grimly chambers a round, the audience will have no idea why.

While I’m querying for novel #1, I’ve started editing novel #2, and these thoughts have been foremost in my mind. It’s a fascinating thing to think about, because figuring out how your character defines love (or hate or fear or joy) tells you so much more about the character than any other part of their personal history.

In other news:

If you’re into parenting blogs and geek stuff, or even if you’re not, I’d recommend checking out my pal Aimee’s blog, Fake Geek Mom. She’s a lovely person and brilliant writer, and some of her recent posts have really hit it out of the park. Her most recent post, A letter to my son, is a beautifully written article about misogyny. I wish everyone would read it.